Tricks of the trade for protecting abandoned homes from vandals

The housing market has improved considerably in the last year, but there remain, as The Wall Street Journalputs it, “scores of vacant homes blighting neighborhoods across the country … easily identified by boarded-up windows and doors (that) pull down property values and attract looters scavenging for copper pipe and other scrap.”Count Robert Klein — founder and chairman of Safeguard Properties — among those looking for new ways to improve the appearance of empty properties.“Nonprofits and entrepreneurs are finding ways to make properties appear occupied, from decorating them for the holidays to boarding them up with hard plastic windows instead of plywood,” the Journal says.One company, Home Illusions, “has a line of decals that cost from around $40 to $100, including fake screen doors and stained-glass windows,” according to the story. The paper notes that nonprofits in Cincinnati and Chicago now “enlist local artists to paint faux facades or curtain-drawn windows on boarded-up homes in hopes of making them less conspicuous.”SecureView windows, made by a newly formed company in Cleveland, “takes a different approach: Instead of boarding-up vacant homes, they seal the windows up with a clear plastic material that looks like glass but they say is tougher than wood,” The Journal reports."Our goal is to eliminate plywood, period," says Mr. Klein, the company's chairman.Howard Wedren, a Chicago real estate developer, invented the SecureView window in 2009 in an attempt to save an investment in a warehouse project near a brick-faced retail strip with foreclosures and closed businesses.“Searching for coverup ideas, Mr. Wedren bought clear acrylic and polycarbonate plastics that he installed in his cinder block garage and, for testing purposes, attacked with rocks and a sledgehammer,” The Journal says. “After $10,000 in aggressive tinkering, he brought the idea to Mr. Klein, a Cleveland-based investor who was chief executive of a property-management firm. Mr. Klein asked him to reduce the cost, which Mr. Wedren eventually did by using recycled materials.”

This and that

Rocky road:Healthcare.gov has been a huge embarrassment for the Obama administration, but it “now looks like a blessing: a distraction from the more fundamental problems with Obamacare.”So writes Bloomberg's Caroline Baum in a post that mentions the Cleveland Clinic.

“Just this week we learned that some insurance companies can't or won't extend existing plans for a year,” according to Ms. Baum.“Insurers are restricting choices of hospitals and doctors to contain costs,” she adds. “Some hospitals, including the Cleveland Clinic, have decided to participate only in plans with higher reimbursement rates.”Indeed, The Washington Postreported that in some cases since the rollout of Obamacare, “the goal of lowering costs has prompted the opposite reaction: Providers themselves have balked at being in exchange networks because they are unhappy with the reimbursement rates or are concerned that the exchanges could be dominated by sick people who won't be able to pay their portion of the bills.”According to The Post, “The Cleveland Clinic said it decided to limit itself to plans on Ohio's exchange that offered higher reimbursement rates and were backed by brand-name insurers.”Direct approach:Dr. Michael Rothberg, vice chair for research at the Cleveland Clinic Medicine Institute, shares a difficult family story in this New York Times blog post about medical directives.“The old man lashed out the first night he spent in the nursing home. His behavior was so alarming that staff transferred him to a nearby hospital for evaluation,” the post begins.The gentleman then was put in restraints and sedated.“He stopped walking, talking. He didn't seem to recognize anybody,” Dr. Rothberg recalled.The Times notes that Dr. Rothberg then “stopped to collect himself as he spoke about this dementia patient, his father-in-law.”After another difficult hospitalization, this time for pneumonia, “the family decided they didn't want this vulnerable, distressed relative transferred from the nursing home again if he took ill,” according to The Times. They asked that a “do not hospitalize” order be communicated to staff and placed in his medical record. Several months later, according to the post, “the patient stopped eating and drinking and passed away.”

Dr. Rothberg and colleagues in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts have written a new paper on what The Times characterizes as “little known, poorly understood medical directives.” It is a small study of 16 health care proxies for patients with advanced dementia — largely their adult children, and some nieces and nephews.The key finding: “Often, proxies are confused about how 'do not hospitalize' orders work,” according to the post. “Several proxies believed, mistakenly, that a such an order was equivalent to a request to withhold medical intervention altogether.”No turning back: Give Gov. John Kasich credit for standing his ground on Medicaid expansion.The Wall Street Journal visits Scottsdale, Ariz., which this week hosted the annual Republican Governors Association meeting, and looks at how a handful of GOP governors have bucked the party trend to embrace a central tenet of Obamacare: expanding Medicaid to cover the poor.It's not a popular position among Republicans, but Gov. Kasich isn't soft-pedaling his support.He tells The Journal that Medicaid expansion offered a chance to provide health care to people just scraping by, like a single mom making $7 or $8 an hour who lacked insurance or other lower-income families struggling to deal with drug addiction or mental illness.“For me, it was an easy decision,” he says. “It's going to save lives, it's going to help people and you tell me what's more important than that.”Gov. Kasich declined, though, to criticize other GOP governors who has resisted Medicaid expansion.“Can I judge why other people don't want to do it?” he asked. “I don't think that's fair. But, for me, it is the right thing to do.”You also can follow me on Twitter for more news about business and Northeast Ohio.

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